Onemanda Preisinger feels anxious about her daughter’s impending 13th birthday party. It’s not due to the typical causes associated with a home packed of clamorous preteen kids, but since it’s the initial occasion she will showcase her recently altered face to friends and relatives. “Clearly I’m going to tell everyone as they come in, ‘For your information, this is not how I look,’” states the thirty-year-old property agent from south Florida.
Her appearance is, well, a little startling – her face swollen and unnaturally tightened, as though held together by heavy-duty tape. Her altered – and she’s keen to stress, temporary – appearance is the outcome of six aesthetic surgeries, including an minimally invasive facelift, conducted by a doctor in Turkey’s Istanbul, last month. “My spouse teared up when he viewed me for the first time because I wasn’t able to even unseal my eyes. That’s how puffy I was,” she tells me via video call from her house. “I had to tell him: ‘Honey, I’m okay, I’m not in pain. I just appear as if someone jumped me.’”
Growing Trend of Early Facelifts
According to cosmetic specialists, Preisinger is among a growing number of people electing to have a rhytidectomy in their 20s and 30s – well over a ten years prior to most doctors’ usual candidate age of 40 to 60. (Though most surgeons are eager to highlight the industry edict of: “We treat genetics, not years.”) “I have individuals in their late twenties requesting facial lifts,” states based in London aesthetic plastic surgeon Georgios Orfaniotis, a former NHS consultant who specialises in the head and neck. “It’s a major surgery, and I’m a somewhat worried when I see people choosing it as a lifestyle choice.”
Understanding the Facelift Procedure
A facelift, also known as a rhytidectomy, elevates the tissues in the face that start to sag as we grow older. “Human faces are built a bit like layers of an onion,” explains based in Kent facial plastic surgeon Marc Pacifico. “Dermis and adipose on the top, then a stratum of supportive tissue known as the superficial musculoaponeurotic system. Consider the SMAS as the structural foundation of the face. And that’s what causes aging; that’s what loosens and sags and drags the skin downward with it.”
You risk operating on individuals that have underlying problems. It’s not advisable for an ethical plastic surgeon to pursue
Previously reserved of affluent seniors, “filler fatigue” – when excessive use of dermal fillers expands the face and leads to looseness in the skin – alongside the common adoption of weight-loss drugs, low-cost medical tourism, and the development of new, celebrity-endorsed surgical techniques are driving a new kind of customer towards this major operation. Reports indicate an 8% increase in facial lifts over the last year in the UK; while a study found that the percentage of younger facelift patients is growing, with 32% of facelifts now conducted for patients aged 35-55.
“People are asking now to look like the best version of themselves and naturally the techniques are evolving,” comments Orfaniotis. At present, the trending procedure is the comprehensive facial lift, a technique promoted by figures including Kardashian matriarch Kris Jenner, to style creator Marc Jacobs.
Advanced Lifting Method
While a more traditional facelift entails elevating the SMAS, the comprehensive lift releases the facial ligaments beneath it, enabling surgeons to restructure the face by repositioning the deeper tissue, and preventing the tight, stretched look sometimes wrought by older methods. “We avoid placing stress on the dermis because we’re targeting deeper, to the deeper tissue,” explains Harley Street plastic surgeon Rajiv Grover, who focuses on the advanced method. “It is the deeper tissue that is repositioned. The dermis comes with it as a secondary element.” Lifting the whole facial structure as a single unit allows for a more natural-looking and more durable outcome. It additionally implies that the surgery is not just being used for the primary goal of youth preservation – or rejuvenation, as the cosmetic field terms it – but for “enhancement” and facial restructuring, too. “We’re getting many inquiries from patients aged late twenties to mid-thirties for this purpose,” says Grover.
Individual Experience
Preisinger had not intended on getting a facelift – at minimum not at the age of 30. But long-term using injectable gels in an attempt at “facial balancing” meant that by the time she entered her late 20s, she was “damaged”. “I didn’t do this because I wanted to look youthful,” she says. “I underwent it because the filler harmed my face. I regret ever using it. If I didn’t have the filler, I don’t believe I would be in this situation currently.”
Whether dermal fillers completely disappear has long been a debated topic in the aesthetics industry. “Research have indicated that not only do they rarely fully dissipate,” states Grover, “but they migrate and can block lymphatic channels. One of the contributors to what we term ‘pillow face’ is also the reality that in a sense, the face gets somewhat fluid-filled because its capacity to remove lymphatic fluid has been reduced.” Although studies into the area is early-stage, warnings on dermal fillers’ potential impact on the lymphatic system have been released, and additional studies announced. An esteemed face specialist, commenting on the condition of anonymity, mentioned he would never use injectables in a patient because of the dangers they present. “Many doctors avoid discussing this, because the manufacturers who make injectables can be pretty aggressive.” He’s been told accounts, he says, of cosmetic doctors facing court orders after raising their concerns.
Choice and Surgery
For Preisinger, once she started using injectables, she felt as if she needed to continue adding more – especially as it started to migrate to other parts of her face. She was just 28 when a local plastic surgeon in Florida proposed that a face and neck lift could be what she needed to finally step off the cycle of treatments. After 24 months, she found herself choosing between a selection of suggested accommodations in Istanbul, texted to her by the patient coordinator at her surgeon’s office.
Initially, Preisinger had scheduled an eyelid surgery – better known as eyelid surgery – but her surgeon advised her that a facial lift was the correct option for the laxity she was experiencing in her face. She arranged a brow lift, a mid-facelift and a jawline surgery. The eve of her operation, 24 hours post she’d arrived solo in the country, she decided to add a lip lift. “Then he said, ‘We’re going to elevate the lower eyelid puffiness.’ He added, ‘I think if we extract some buccal fat, it will sculpt your face.’ So I ended up adding two more surgeries,” she recalls. She paid $22,000 (£16,500) for the six-hour operation, including a three-day|
